(Controversial) Dispatch from India—The difference between Sri Lanka & India, and Dreams of Superpowerdom

Will India ever be a ‘real’ super-power?
By Rakhee Ghelani
Crossposted on September 27, 2012 with Intrepid Report

When you live in India, it is almost impossible to go a single day without reading something about corruption. Bribes, kick-backs and ‘gratuities’ are a daily part of living here.

My first official experience of this was when I was travelling in an auto-rickshaw, and the driver accidentally went the wrong way down a one-way street. Unfortunately it was one of the rare times I saw a policeman, who swiftly ordered the driver to stop. After a brief conversation, the driver handed over Rs50 and we were on our way. I asked him whether the Rs50 was a fine, and he explained that the fine was Rs100, the Rs50 was what it cost not to get the fine. The lesson learned: Following the law is not a requirement, and actually it’s not even expected.

Just a cursory look at how people drive here is more than enough evidence that laws either don’t exist or people pay no attention to them, and the only ones who enforce them seem to be those who do so purely to line their own pockets. It is a rather sad state of affairs, and I suspect one of the reasons why India will never be a true “super-power.” They have the brains and the manpower, but there is no discipline, or respect for discipline at all. . . . and no one seems to care!

Whilst not a matter of national importance, one simple example of this is my weekly Circuit class. Circuit is a gym class where there are 12 stations set up and everyone starts at a different station, you then rotate through all the stations by moving one to your right every 60 seconds. In the class I go to each week there is one guy who just does not think he has to follow the rotation, so he moves to different stations every 60 seconds, depending upon what he feels like doing next. It is irrelevant to him that there are 10 other people in the class whose entire work-out is disrupted because he intrudes on their space whenever he feels like it. He has no discipline, has no interest in following simple routine and doesn’t care who it impacts. Sadly, our gym instructor just tolerates his behaviour and makes no attempt to correct it, so the rest of us just have to put up with it.

Yes it is a very simplified way of looking at things, but this is just one example of so many I see every single day.

Another way that India makes it harder on itself to be taken seriously is the levels of bureaucracy. I moved to Mumbai in March and tried to register myself for a PAN card, which means I can be a law-abiding taxpaying citizen. I was not able to apply for a PAN card because I didn’t have a formal address (I have an informal rental arrangement), all my legal documentation (such as my OCI card) shows an Australian address and I don’t even have a license. So I was unable to register. This meant I had trouble getting work, for which I would pay tax, because I couldn’t pay tax legitimately without a PAN card. I would also have trouble getting a formal lease arrangement without a PAN card (and which I needed to get a PAN card). . . . . and the merry-go-round went on (I have now managed to get myself a PAN card, but it took 5 months and a ridiculous amount of paperwork).

Whilst most countries fall over themselves to make it easy for you to pay tax, India manages to find as many barriers as possible to prevent you from complying with the law. It is actually almost easier to do something outside of the law then it is to be a law-abiding citizen. It seems all the bureaucracy is almost designed to stop India from helping itself.

So I find it amusing when I hear people talk about India being a super-power. Yes it has the population and the brain power, but without organisation and discipline and I am not sure India can ever be a super-power. Having high GDP purely because you have a large population doesn’t make you an economic force to be reckoned with, in my opinion, true economic power comes from being able to yield it to your advantage. Add on top of that the overwhelming fear that seems to exist in foreign policy, with foreign direct investment restricted in India. It is almost like India wants to behave like a communist state, controlling what can come in and what people can see, but still tries to call itself a democracy. However the only things that appear to prevail in this democracy is corruption and anarchy.

Whilst I don’t condone corruption, the anarchy and lack of discipline is a big part of what gives India its charm, life is certainly never boring.

Then you add on top of this the social issues that prevail in India. High levels of illiteracy, poverty, lack of sanitation. . . . whilst many are educated, about a third of the population falls below the poverty line (that is about 400 million people, or 25% more than the entire population of the US). With such extreme issues to deal with, and very little visible action to address them, it seems almost like one part of the population is trying to pretend that the other side doesn’t exist. Whilst I appreciate that the problem is huge and not an easy one to resolve, ignorance doesn’t make a great leader, action does.

Colourful, incredible and challenging. . . . yes India is all of these things . . . but a world super-power. . . . I doubt we will see this in my lifetime.

Rakhee Ghelani is an Australian woman of Indian origin who has packed up her life and moved to India. She publishes the blog aussiegirlinindia.com. You can follow her on Twitter at https://twitter.com/#!/rakheeghelani. She also has a Facebook page. Email her at rakhee@aussiegirlinindia.com.

ONE RESPONSE TO WILL INDIA EVER BE A ‘REAL’ SUPER-POWER?

A Reader | September 27, 2012 at 11:12 pm |
Everything you have said in your criticism of India – the maddening bureaucracy that seems to have been put in place not to get work done, but to stall it, the appallingly inconsiderate social behaviour of many people, and other things – is true, except your conclusion. Why is it a good thing to be a superpower, Rakhee? Historically, superpowers have become so by plundering and brutal and bloody conquest, deeds of staggering violence and unfairness, ruining the lives and futures of entire populations. Would that be really a desirable goal?

Please carry on criticizing India – you should – criticism is a very healthy form of free speech and far too little practised anywhere these days for fear of “offending” this, that or other “sensitive” group. However, don’t forget to look at your own Euro-centric bias, wherein apparently lording it over other people whose resources and wealth one has illegitimately appropriated is somehow a good thing merely by the fact that it succeeded.

It might be that it is because you have not yet critically examined the concept of superpower (trashing the environment and consuming the world’s resources like there’s no tomorrow is one very obvious example – in which the superpowers lead the world) that you wish India to be become one.

I would consider it far more important that India provide a decent standard of living to her own people, especially to its most vulnerable, treat women as equal human beings (ha! not in my lifetime) and demolish the despicable caste system than aspire to superpowerhood of the usual kind. Wouldn’t you?

That said, this Indian woman warmly welcomes your regular criticism of India on this forum and anywhere else. I hope that when you look at your other country, Australia, you will be as frank and unsparing – and honest.

By Rakhee Ghelani, Aussie Girl in India
It had been 18 months since I had been outside of India.  That’s a long time, and to be honest I didn’t think going to Sri Lanka was really going to be a big change from what had become normality to me, after all at some points there is only 30 kilometres separating Tamil Nadu from Sri Lanka, as I discovered when visiting Rameswaram.

How wrong was I?

From the minute we got off the plane I knew I was in a different country. It wasn’t just a case of a “same same but different”, it was a competely new and refreshing experience.  So exactly how is Sri Lanka different from India?

The People

The first thing I noticed was the people.  They are polite, respectful and considerate of others.  I was astonished at the airport as a car slowed down to let us cross the road.  I have become accustomed to being defensive when trying to pass a car, it took a while for me to get used to trusting that someone wasn’t going to try and run me over when I went near a road.  The only exception would have to be buses, which hurtle down the narrow roads at a breakneck pace to catch their next passenger, taking no prisoners along the way. You have to be quick and on your guard to stay out of their way.

One of the disadvantages with dealing with such a polite race is that it was a challenge getting them to tell us what they wanted.  Our driver was too shy to ask us for an advance payment. It took him four days to work up the courage to subtly ask us for some money, something that would have been no issue at all.

Whilst I didn’t feel “stared at” as much as I do in India, I have never been flashed at at home, and unfortunately I was on my first day in Sri Lanka. That said, I still think I would feel quite safe travelling around Sri Lanka on my own if I were to come again.  There is a gentleness to the race that makes me believe it would be alright for a solo female traveller (however on this trip I travelled with my parents and cousin).

The Environment

I have always known that India is not the cleanest of places, but I think after 18 months I am becoming a little bit desensitised to the filth that covers the streets.  Sri Lanka certainly reminded how beautiful the world can look.

Even though this country does not have as much wealth as India, its people appear to have a much better standard of living.  I only saw one small slum in my travels, unlike the hundreds (or thousands) I have seen all over India.  Yes Sri Lanka is much smaller than India, but it doesn’t have anywhere near the amount of resources or extravagance that I have seen either.

Somehow, this small country has found a way to provide a reasonable standard of living for its population, despite being in a state of war for so long.  The streets are relatively clean, there are few make-shift houses and I had almost forgotten what fresh, unadulterated air smelt like! Walking along the seaside promenade in the centre of Colombo I couldn’t help but wonder why Bandra Bandstand or Marine Drive couldn’t be so pristine.  There was no rubbish littering the sand, no one relieving themselves on the beach and no fear that the water was contaminated with god knows what.

Looking around Sri Lanka made me feel a bit sad that India, this country that I love and call home, can’t find a way to provide a minimum standard of living to so many, or even just have some pride in the environment.  In this regard, Sri Lanka really does put India to shame.

The Food

The hardest part of the trip would have to have been the lack of variety in the food, particularly for vegetarians.  Whilst I am not vegetarian my mother is and I really felt for her whenever we stopped somewhere for a meal.  At almost every town and restaurant we visited we were greeted with exactly the same menu. Whilst Sri Lankan rice and curry is fabulous, there was no other variety for a vegetarian. I found this really odd, particularly since it is a predominantly buddhist country.

In India I was vegetarian for the 9 months I backpacked and never had an issue, it is such an accepted part of the culture that it makes travelling the country a joy. For any vegetarian thinking of going to Sri Lanka, I would suggest they should be prepared to have little variety and just stick to the local rice and curry (without the meat).

Return?

Leaving Sri Lanka, did make me think a little about why I was choosing to return to India.  Now I am back here I see the opportunity and diversity that this country has, but I do long for the crystal blue waters of Sri Lanka.  I am sure I will return to this neighbouring country sometime soon.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

I am an Australian born woman of Indian origin in my late-30′s. I have lived in Australia my whole life, but travelled to India 7 times (for both work and pleasure) and feel a strong affiliation with the country. Over the past few years, I unfortunately experienced a lot of grief and loss, and decided to turn my life upside down and see what falls out the other side.

So I gathered together enough old family documents to justify my Indian heritage, and was granted Overseas Citizenship to India.  This means I can live and work in India forever. My first 9 months were spent backpacking across the country, and I now live and work in Mumbai.

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Island Mystique: Three startling differences Between India and Sri Lanka
21 January 2012

Professor Alaka Basu ~ pic: cornell.edu
By Alaka M.Basu

Hello Friends:

A friend sent me an interesting article that appeared in “The Telegraph”published in Kolkota (Calcutta). It is written by Alaka M.Basu who is a professor in the Department of Development Sociology at Cornell University,USA.

Ms.Basu was in Sri Lanka on a holiday recently and is captivated by its charm like most travellers to our lovely Island “where every prospect pleases”. She has viewed Sri Lanka from the perspective of being an Indian woman and has compared and contrasted both countries based on her limited experience. Alaka observes that there are three startling or striking differences between Sri Lanka and India.

Since these “differences” pinpointed by her are complimentary to Sri Lanka I am tempted to repeat the famous French statement about the differences between women and men “Vive La Difference”.

I do not want to comment on the impressions of Ms. Basu but simply thank her for writing from her heart about Sri Lanka and Sri Lankans. It is refreshingly different and certainly made me “feel good” for a while. I want to share this with readers and am reproducing it on my blog.

So here it is Friends-DBS Jeyaraj

Island Mystique:Three startling differences Between India and Sri Lanka
By Alaka M.Basu

I am writing this on the road from Colombo to Kandy. And again (I have been doing this repeatedly for the last four days) I thank the gods for having allowed this break from the bitter cold of Delhi into such a lush paradise of warmth and water and throat-searing food.

But it is also a bit disorienting to be in this country. It feels like home country (the landscape is especially so reminiscent of Kerala) and yet there is something that is distinctly different. One does not get this kind of disorientation in a patently different land — Japan or Sweden for example; there everything is new and different and so one is clearly an outsider. And within India, even in places far away from one’s “usual place of residence” (as the census calls it), there are reminders of the larger country one claims citizenship of — Hindi film music wafting out of narrow lanes, life-sized posters of un-photogenic politicians wishing someone or being wished by someone or the other “haardik kamnayein” for a birthday or festival, familiar brand names of soaps and spices in roadside grocery stores.

This is what I think at first is the cause of the feeling of disorientation in Colombo. Until I notice that I recognize the Hindi film melodies of the Sinhala songs playing on taxi radios and notice that Sri Lankan politicians are as un-photogenic and as poster-hungry as ours, and discover that the Tata and Airtel and Reliance (as well as Ariel and Colgate and Lux) brands are as visibly ubiquitous as in India.

So what is it that makes me feel out of place? The drive to Kandy is long and my moving pen gradually reaches a conclusion. There is something culturally amiss here. I am not seeing some important things that I expect to see when the people around look so much like me that they even come and ask me for road directions.

Culture is a big word, I know, and it implies things that are long-standing and stable and difficult to change. If I believed this lay definition of culture I would be very depressed indeed, because what is missing in Sri Lankan culture should be missing from India too, and the thought of culture being an immutable thing should make one hopelessly sad in this particular case.

Luckily, the more academic current definition of culture is all about it being dynamic and changeable and negotiable, so maybe reflecting on the positive culture of Sri Lanka will help us to change and negotiate our own negative one as well.

So how are Sri Lankans different from us? I know of course all the text book stuff that was rammed down our throats in classes on development in college — the remarkable literacy rates (virtually universal), the excellent health (infant mortality, maternal mortality and life expectancy levels that rival Western Europe’s), the fantastic public services for health and education that persist in the face of a neo-liberal economy.

I also know that this country has seen more than two decades of brutal violence, which seems to have finally ended or at least paused (thanks to a period of even more brutal violence, some say). But these are not things that one notes visually and anecdotally enough to account for one’s feeling of disorientation.

Then what are these more obviously visible unique features of life in Sri Lanka? I think that three startling differences make up the root cause of my disorientation. Maybe they are related, but maybe they are not — they are quite distinct and don’t automatically accompany economic growth (they certainly have not accompanied our own long period of 8-9 per cent gross domestic product growth); that is why I call them cultural rather than socio-economic.

First of all (and dearest to my own heart) is the ease and joy with which women traverse public spaces. In the densest crowds, such as in the packed public buses we ride in Colombo and (as I am still to discover) in the heaving masses paying their new year’s respects in the Tooth temple in Kandy, if this had been India (and especially if this had been Delhi), there would have been few women daring enough to actually be present as well as to smile pleasantly at strangers — even male strangers, as my husband happily discovers.

Instead they would be fearful of being groped and mauled if young (or even middle-aged) and pushed roughly aside if old and weak. But I am not ‘eve-teased’ and nor do I break any bones; so I wonder what age category I should slot myself in. Instead, there is a miraculous one inch of free space that surrounds me from top to bottom and back to front right in the middle of these superficially shoving crowds. I cannot stop rubbing my eyes in amazement at this.

My second reason for feeling out of place is that public spaces are unreasonably clean. Neither in Colombo nor on the road to Kandy did I see the mounds of filth-encrusted plastic bags and other forms of smelly or environment-contaminating waste that even the most expensive parts of our own cities and towns revel in. Nor were public buildings and roadsides ungrudging receptacles for fiery red spit. Sri Lankans may not eat paan, but they do use plastic bags alas, and they must be having household garbage too; where they dispose of these things remains a mystery to me.

The third striking absence was of the kind of degrading poverty one sees in such abundance in any place in India. I don’t think their poor and homeless get hidden from view as ours reportedly were in Delhi during the Commonwealth Games and, yet, even the one apparent beggar I saw on the street, and tried to give some change to, turned out to have a sheaf of lottery tickets she pressed upon me in return. This absence of broken-hearted (and frequently broken-limbed) poverty was so in your face that I forgave myself for wondering which planet I was on.

The explanation probably lies in the equally implausible absence of evidence of roaring wealth of the kind that hurts one’s eyes and ears in the shopping malls of Delhi and Mumbai and Calcutta (my anthropological expedition to the mall in Colombo — Majestic City — that the local people proudly urged me to visit was such a damp squib after Ambience Mall in Delhi and South City in Calcutta) as well as in the fancy car dealerships in Kolhapur and Coimbatore. In other words, in spite of having a per capita income close to twice ours, if crazy consumerism is a bit reined in in Sri Lanka, there must be greater income equality than we have here and that might explain the relative absence of stark poverty.

PS: When I started writing this piece, I meant to include a fourth Sri Lankan virtue — the absence of petty cheating. But this had to be dropped after our experience at the Elephant Orphanage in Pinnawala.

As we neared the bathing baby elephants in this spot of popular tourist attraction, a scrupulously innocent looking man in a lungi persuaded us to give him Rs 100 for a bag of bananas to feed the elephants. Excited about this feeding adventure we rushed to the water only to be stopped by a guard who pointed us to a sign saying that feeding the animals was prohibited and that we had to leave the bananas on the ground. Needless to say, given our Indian expectations, when we turned around within seconds before admiring the elephants, there was no sign of the fruit seller or the guard. Or the packet of bananas.